How to Use AWS GPU instances with Tensorflow and Keras Deep Learning frameworks

Disclaimer : I am not an expert, this is only a small contribution from a self(internet)-taught beginner with AWS who wants to synthesize what he’s learned. And I’m happy to learn even more if this is incorrect or (surely) improvable.

UPDATE Feb 22nd 2017 : I created another AMI, mainly with Tensorflow 1.0 and for p2 instances rather than g2. To use it, replace vict0rsch-1.0 by vict0rsch-2.0, North California by North Virginia and g2 by p2 in the following text. See the AMI’s details here.

UPDATE 2 Feb 15th 2018 : As Amazon’s Deep Learning AMI is decent and comes with everything installed there is no need for me to go on with creating those, use theirs in the following tutorial!

To be done:
* Theano 0.8 I currently have issues during theano.test() if anyone wants to help
* Lasagne 0.1
* rsub by default

This AMI can be seen as a list of softwares, it does not specify the hardware you are going to use. Therefore the 3 main steps of this tutorial will be :

Select the AMI

Select the Instance (hardware)

Connect to it

Before you go

If you have never launched an EC2 instance (maybe if you’re changing region?) your EC2 instances limit is set to 0 by default. Therefore at launch time, at the end of the whole process you’ll be prompted a “Launch Failed” error…

To save you some time here is what you’ve got to do : go to http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/ec2-request and write them a nice message asking for a higher limit. I randomly asked for 3 and got 5. Maybe it’s standard. Don’t forget to select the right region as AMIs are region-specific. So is pricing.

I asked for a “Web” contact method and they got back to me in 2 business days. So if you’re in a hurry maybe the phone method is faster. I don’t know. People with experience could elaborate on that.

You can still try stuff with the micro free tier instances (which don’t have GPU).
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In a nutshell

Go to EC2 instances in North California region

Select vict0rsch-1.0 community AMI

Select g2.2xlarge instance

Set up Security group

Download RSA private key

Connect via ssh : ssh -i key.pem ubuntu@address

Selecting an AMI

Region

I assume you have created an AWS account. The AMI we are going to use (mine, feel free to comment on this) is located in the North California region. So be sure that once you get to the AWS Console you select North California in the top right corner.

AMI

You’ll be asked to “Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)”. On the left, click “Community AMIs”, look for vict0rsch-1.0 and select it.

Lauching the instance

Choose an Instance Type

To speed up computation, we’ll use a GPU instance, so select a g2.2xlarge instance. Now click on “Review and launch”

Security groups

We need to define who’s gonna be able to connect to the instance (by default it can connect itself to any address via any protocol).

So create a new security group with a name and description of your choice.

In “Source” click on My IP, and the line should look like ssh | TCP | 22 | My IP your.ip/32

Storage

The whole setup takes a bit more than 9GB. By default the AMI makes the instance have 24GB storage. See the “Storage” tab (no shit…) to edit this according to your needs.

Now “Launch” !

Key Pair

You’ve been prompted with a Key pair choice. This is about the private RSA key that will allow you to connect to the instance. Create a new one, give it a name and download it. Then move it wherever you want but it might be a good idea not to let it in your downloads directory.

You can create a new key at every instance launch but you will need the declared one to connect to the instance.

OK! Your instance is being launched by Amazon, click on the blue link with the instance ID or go to your console (it’s the same anyway) and go in the “Instances” tab. It will only take a few minutes before it’s running and you can connect to it.

Connecting to the instance

SSH

You’ll connect to the instance via ssh. To do so you need the instance’s address which is found writen in bold at the bottom of the window when you select the instance. It looks like Public DNS: ec2-54-183-195-215.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

The default user of Ubuntu Server instances is ubuntu but on other AMIs such as the Amazon Linux ones it is usually ec2-user.

We’ll use te flag -i to specify that we use an identity file i.e. the key we downloaded from Amazon.

If you want to copy files from the instance to your own computer, state first the with the instance and then your own computer. So from YOUR computer you would do scp -i path_to_key/key.pem user@address:location/file path_to_file/on_your_machine

SSH - SCP Errors

If you are prompted with the Permission denied (publickey)error or the operation is timed out it can mean:

Your instance is not running (yet?)

That you are not using the right RSA key

You are trying to log into another machine (wrong address)

You are trying to log in with the wrong user

Your instance does not allow your IP (so go and add it in its security group)

Your .pem file does not have the right permissions (Permissions 0644 for 'XXX.pem' are too open.) -> change them with chmod 400 mykey.pem

I also had Connection closed by <address> errors. So far the only way I found was to create a new KeyPair from the Amazon console. You can save your progress by taking a snapshot, terminating the instance and starting a new one with a new KeyPair from the snapshot.

If the scp command does not say anything and fails, check that you did not forget the path on the remote host at the end of the address : [...].com:~/ for instance.

Anyway you can have scp and ssh be more verbose using -v-vv or -vvv depending on the details you want.

Outbound connections

By default your instance can connect anywhere. You can change that (or make it so if it seems that the instance can’t connect to the internet) to add a rule to the security group.

To do so, from the “Instances” tab, go to the far right of your running instance’s line and click on its security group link. Then click on the bottom “Outbound” tab and edit the rules. If you see All traffic | All | All | 0.0.0.0/0 it means, obviously, that the instance can do whatever it wants!

GUIs

Text editor

You can use Sublime Text 2 (not 3 saddly) to edit your remote files from your own computer using rsub See this tutorial (and don’t forget the Sublime Text 2 app must be running on your computer). This means Sublime Text will edit the remote file using scp under the hood so you can use your GUI for the EC2 instance.

Be careful, if the connection between your computer and the remote instance is lost (internet hicup, reboot etc.), Sublime Text 2 will not tell you that it is not connected anymore. So if you change things in your code and it seems like it has no effect, maybe Sublime is not writing on the remote instance anymore! Check by adding a dumb print somewhere or doing a cat on the instance. In doubt, close the sublime window and rsub again!

File transfers

You can play hero and do everything using scp. Or you can make your life easier with a software that will basically act like a file explorator and transfer agent between the remote instance and your computer. Get Filezilla and follow these instructions.

Testing

Tensorflow’s examples

You can check that everyting runs by going to Tensorflow’s examples : cd ~/anaconda3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/tensorflow/models/image/cifar10 then either python -m cifar10_train.py or open an iPython console and run cifar10_train.py.
Tensorflow will first download the data it needs to train and then train displaying this kind of line :

You can check that this training speed is quite good compared to what they get here.

Your own work

Once you’re logged in your instance, you’re basically within a GUI-free Ubuntu machine. Using the scp commands described above, you can transfer code and check that it runs as expected (or better!). Also using rsub is quite handy. Hacky testing : nano my_file.py then paste your code, ctr+X to quit and save (say yes) and python my_file.py.

If the instance lacks specific libraries, well just like at home you can apt-get and pip3 (etc.) what you need. However if you terminate the instance whithout saving a snapshot all personal settings will be gone when restarting later from my AMI. See next section. Suggest improvements if you feel like other people are going to need this library and it should be default.

End of work

You’ve done some nonesense for a while, now playtime is over. If you keep your instance running Amazon’s going to keep billing you. You can either stop or terminate your instance.

Terminate

You don’t need this instance anymore, all the data it contains is going to be deleted. Consider taking a snapshot to backup your data (of course it’s stored on Amazon, on S3, so it will be charged but cheaper than EBS). No more billing related to the instance however.

Stop

You’ll re-use this instance soon enough. Its volumes are kept in Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). No more instance billing and your data’s still here when you restart it (right click Instance state -> start) but you pay for EBS which is more expensive. But not that much if you have only a few GBs and not big TBs.

So…?

Terminate if the job is done. Billing = zero.

Termninate and snapshot if job is done but someday you’ll need it again. Billing = compressed snapshot on S3.

Improvements + Update form

You can either suggest improvements here, build your own AMI from this one or from scratch -> see here.

As far as this very tutorial is concerned, please pull-request edits, corrections, improvement suggestions and use issues to get help. I’m however far from being experienced with this… Let’s hope there will be someone somewhere in the community to help you. Or stackoverflow may be a good idea.

Also I will maintain a TO DO list for the next version of the AMI according to your feedback. I am not sure how this is going to evolve so if you want to be updated sign up to this form. The use I’ll have of this will be mainly to tell you when the next version is out but the most important thing is I may delete the AMI (I’m paying for it so I won’t have too many of these) after such an upgrade. At which point you may want to snapshot your work to start on the new one so you’ll need to know when this is going to happen.

Pricing

I won’t go into details here but roughly speaking you are charged per hour and according to the volume of your (S3) snapshots and (EBS) volumes.

Checkout “My Billing Dashboard” when you click on your account in the top right corner.

Using Tensorboard on the remote AWS instance

If you want to use Tensorboard, go to your instance’s security group settings and add a custom TCP inbound rule for port 6006 (tensorboard’s default) and allow whoever you want (your ip only or anyone?). You’ll then be able to access the tensorboard web page at your public DNS’s address : http://ec2-blabla.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:6006/